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Freedreno ARM GPU Driver Keeps Hitting Milestones

Phoronix: Freedreno ARM GPU Driver Keeps Hitting Milestones

The Freedreno open-source graphics driver project that's a clean-room reverse-engineered implementation of the Qualcomm Adreno graphics core on the company's ARM SoCs keeps reaching new milestones. While the driver is mostly just worked on by Rob Clark and without any support from Qualcomm, it's quickly becoming the flagship open-source ARM graphics driver for the Linux desktop...

The Freedreno open-source graphics driver project that's a clean-room reverse-engineered implementation of the Qualcomm Adreno graphics core on the company's ARM SoCs keeps reaching new milestones. While the driver is mostly just worked on by Rob Clark and without any support from Qualcomm, it's quickly becoming the flagship open-source ARM graphics driver for the Linux desktop...

Its probably worth pointing out that the newer IFC6410's are shipping with a newer/faster SoC. Not the S4-APQ8064 1.5 GHz Quad-core Krait200 any more, but the Snapdragon600 APQ8064T 1.7 GHz Quad-core Krait300. As far as the Adreno part of it goes, it shouldn't be much or any difference, but the 8064T did require some kernel changes to get operational, specifically involving CPU voltages.

Its probably worth pointing out that the newer IFC6410's are shipping with a newer/faster SoC. Not the S4-APQ8064 1.5 GHz Quad-core Krait200 any more, but the Snapdragon600 APQ8064T 1.7 GHz Quad-core Krait300. As far as the Adreno part of it goes, it shouldn't be much or any difference, but the 8064T did require some kernel changes to get operational, specifically involving CPU voltages.

oh, that's good to know... (a) I'm jealous, mine is only 1.5GHz, and (b) I wonder if I need to rebase my ifc6410-drm branch to pick up some 8064T changes? So far I think nobody complained that my pre-built kernels didn't work or that my branch was out of date. But not sure how recently they made the switch.

Does he have an deep knowledge of the hardware and the software bits of the driver?

Is Qualcomn SoC easier to understand?

I am asking this for curiosity's sake, because Mali, Etnaviv and others doesn't seem to improve so fast, even having (apparently) more man power...

Etnaviv is quite far along, and has implemented some features that I've not had time for yet (like MSAA). But yes, some of the GPUs have turned out to be easier to figure out than others for various reasons.. some have separate vertex and fragment shader ISA's to r/e (mali-400/tegra), some make the shader compiler take care of more things than others (mali), some have a very convoluted architecture to figure out how to intercept command-stream (powervr), etc.

Anyone aware of a sub-$80 board that might be suitable for this?
(I'm open to something less than an S4, though ARMv7 would be nice. Single-core @ 1 GHz is not unthinkable.)

hmm, well it would probably require more than $70 worth of hacking, but I suppose a freescale iMX5 (which had an adreno 200) might be in that sort of price range.

(But, that would need either for libdrm_freedreno to support yet a different kernel interface, or to port msm drm/kms, and add a2xx + gpummu support. So some non-trivial hacking required, but of course patches welcome :-))

You might also checkout what is available with iMX6 (new CuBox, the utilite, perhaps others), which is newer/faster with viviante GPU. Or various other SoC's with vivante. While it isn't upstream yet, the etnaviv gallium driver is pretty far along too, so vivante is shaping up to be another open src graphics option.

Originally Posted by Ibidem

Is it still possible to use the original framebuffer driver, or do I need to figure out how to configure a 3.1x kernel to replace the 2.6.35 kernel on my phone?